Map users are demanding ever more powerful and personalized mapping applications. In addition, the volume of detailed, high-quality data available for use by mapping applications is constantly growing. These factors can drive the development of increasingly accurate, robust and granular mapping applications.
Such mapping applications can divide map data into numerous portions that can be arranged as tiles. A tile can represent a rectangular or square region on a map, although other shapes are possible. When organized in a hierarchical manner, map tiles can enable zooming. A way to enable interactive map features is by providing zoom levels, where the highest zoom level can correspond to a single map tile representing the image seen from the highest altitude from the ground, and the lowest zoom level can correspond to map tiles representing the images seen from the lowest altitude to the ground.
However, the sheer amount of raw map tile data upon which mapping applications rely is enormous and ever-expanding, imposing constraints on the efficiency and timely performance of base map loading and processing. Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and systems for these important functions.